We are the only generation of artists to be negatively affected by AI

What people don't seem to realize about the lawsuit battles between artists and AI is that in 30 years, no one will care.

We are the only generation of artists who entered the art industry before AI became good, then witnessed the tech becoming good enough to disrupt that industry.

In the pre-AI world, one might've seen or heard a piece of art or music, then thought, "I want to dedicate my life to learning how to make something that good". This thought was not predicated on the knowledge that in 30 years a technology would be able to make something approximately or almost that good in 30 seconds rather than 5 months. And we are the last people on Earth to experience that rug pull, because our children and grand-children will NOT have that issue because generative AI will have always existed to them. Going forward, anyone going into the arts already knows what they're getting into, are happy to create it in spite of the technology existing (or uses it to create what they want), and hence will not be motivated to legislate against it.

Backlash against AI causes even more harm to art than AI itself

In our fervor to prioritize humans over machines when evaluating art, we’ve conditioned our minds to hate anything perceived as “AI/slop” and love anything perceived as non-AI. In visual art, AI “slop” typically manifests as eye-popping saturated colors, heavily made-up, overly beautiful people, and post-processing. In short, AI was trained to produce what people considered beautiful, and now, in an ultimate uno reverse card, everything that people considered “beautiful” is now considered ugly, because it’s associated with “AI”. This effect is happening across all mediums: Visual art, music, and writing.

Case in point #1: Observe how in this Reddit post, everyone is gushing about a new AI model, noting Image #2’s superiority over Image #1. What everyone seems to be ignoring is that the main difference is simply that Image 1 is what a professional photographer might’ve done after working on it for hours and applying lots of post-processing, whereas Image 2 is what a normal person would’ve done just be snapping a photo on their phone. If you’d asked everyone 10 years ago which image is better, everyone would’ve answered Image #1. But today, everyone answers Image #2 because it looks plain, which means it’s not as “AI”.

Case in point #2: In 2023, a news article circulated about an artist who was banned from an online community because his art closely resembled AI art. They told him to “find another style”. Never mind that his works are part of the reason AI could make that type of artwork in the first place, and the reason AI was trained to produce that kind of style, was because it’s what people considered conventionally beautiful at the time!

Case in point #3: Many bots posting LLM-generated text, like the one in this reddit comment, are now programmed to purposely make basic grammar mistakes, such as avoiding capitalizing the start of a sentence, and to replace the EM dash with a hyphen. In short, people posting AI-generated text are compelled to literally insert mistakes to make it seem more attractive and less like AI.

At this rate, in the future:

• “Good” visual art will require color-correcting your image to look as bland as possible
• “Good” music will require making so many music theory mistakes that an AI couldn’t have possibly come up with it
• “Good” writing will require lots of grammar/spelling mistakes and misusing hyphens as EM dashes.

Stop recommending blue-collar jobs as a way to survive AI and job loss

An old parable goes like this: A client hires a plumber to fix a leak. After a few hours, the plumber taps one rivet with his hammer, and the leak is fixed. The plumber charges $10,000. The client asks, "You expect me to pay you $10,000 for that?" The plumber says, "I charged $1 to physically hammer it, and $9,999 to know where to hammer."

Think about the last time you hired someone to fix your car, or a leak in your house. Were you paying them to physically turn nuts and bolts? Or were you paying them for their expertise and problem-solving abilities? Every time there's a post about AI and jobs, there are tons of people suggesting that knowledge work is becoming obsolete, and therefore people should go to a trade school for a blue-collar job. Are people somehow forgetting that in a trade school, you learn things about how to do your job more effectively, which is, in effect, knowledge work?

If the day comes that AI can completely automate a typical tech worker's job, it won't be very long before it can automate the job of a plumber, electrician, mechanic, or repairman. Especially with multi-modal models, soon all you will have to do is point your camera at something and ask it where you should point your camera next, which part of the house you should show it to have it get a better diagnosis, what kind of test to run to figure out what's wrong with your car, or what tool you should buy or how you should physically turn the wrench.

Note: We are assuming AI in this hypothetical future had already become powerful enough to replace a typical software engineer or tech worker. As long as AI is not capable of the task I described above, then it is also not yet capable of replacing typical white-collar "knowledge work" in the first place.

Stop saying generative AI "isn't actually AI"

 Do you know the historical industry-standard definition of AI? Do you? I invite you to look up "History of Artificial Intelligence" on Wikipedia because the term is a lot more nebulous than many people assume. 

In fact, "AI" used to refer to practically everything under the sun related to even the most rudimentary attempts to simulate intelligence. The field of "AI" included basic tree search, decision trees, basic if/then algorithms, and statistical techniques such as Markov models. Many are surprised to learn that machine learning was the most advanced subset of "AI". In my 2007 undergrad class called "Artificial Intelligence", machine learning was the last unit of our course, and neural nets were only mentioned as an afterthought on the last day of class, with the professor noting it had potential in the future. Today, they're ubiquitous.

Just about the only field which defined "AI" as anything more than a machine, was from the entertainment industry including movies and video games. Mass Effect popularized the terminology of "VI" vs "AI" in which a VI (virtual intelligence) isn't conscious, but an AI (artificial intelligence) is. I will bet you that the vast majority of people who insist that AI by definition refers to a conscious entity is actually remembering this terminology from Mass Effect, a science fiction game, and in their heads had somehow convinced themselves that it was an actual industry-standard naming system used by computer science researchers.

Someone explain the obsession with the claim that AI can't replace senior developers and can replace junior developers

I seriously can't go 5 minutes on the internet without seeing this claim. Bunch of people say AI coders will replace junior devs, but not senior devs. Gets 100+ upvotes no matter what the social media website.

Now the first question I would ask is, "do you remember what you did as a junior dev"? 100% of the time I ask this question I GET NO RESPONSE.

A junior dev is capable of developing an entire project from scratch with nothing other than stack overflow and some grit. This is in the pre-AI era. If you don't believe me, ask one of these "senior" devs who claims AI will replace junior devs and won't replace senior devs, what they remember doing as a junior dev, and what they were capable of.

Here is my claim: If AI can replace the average junior developer, it can replace the average senior developer within 6 months. If AI can't replace the average senior developer, it can't replace the average junior developer. Let time tell whether I am right and how well my claim has aged.

Prediction: Most software won't run on code in the future

Are you jaded about the trend where as hardware gets better, software gets less efficient and more bloated? Buckle up because it's about to get a lot weirder.

As AI inference trends towards faster and cheaper, and as the models' accuracy improves, there may come a time where a computer is no longer running on code; it's running on the AI telling it what to do in real time. Now you might think, isn't that the same as AI writing code? No it's not; the AI won't need to write code anymore; it will sit between the user and low-level operations in real time, and decide immediately what pixels to show the user and what I/O operations to do based on the context and the user input.

How did I come up with this [dumbass|genius] idea you might ask. One of the holy grails of software engineering is to eliminate bugs. Obviously bugs can't be completely eliminated outright, but if you'll notice, most bugs have a clear intended behavior. The next time you encounter a software bug, ask yourself whether the bug would've happened if, instead of software controlling everything, it were a human with very good memory that could think at 1000x speed.

Won't this introduce a ton of other bugs and unexpected behavior, you might ask. Yes, that's why I agree my idea sounds ridiculous, and would only work if AI models became really good and really fast.

Can a giant neural net really replace a huge amount of code like an entire operating system? It seems like a crazy idea, but crazier things have happened in the past (like the fact that text and images can be generated coherently today would've been considered pretty crazy 10 years ago, which for some reason people now dismiss saying "of course computers can do that" just because it's not as good as a human).

We can see an extremely nascent version of a similar idea in DeepMind's Genie 3, which generates pixels directly rather than using game state as an intermediary (the game state is actually stored in the neural net itself with no manually coded logic)

Circular Time Travel isn't Paradoxical

When I was younger I remember always being pissed at those movies with the typical circular logic time travel loop: The protagonist is convinced through some event to travel back in time. They end up causing the events which convinced them to travel through time in the first place and ultimately either couldn’t or wouldn’t change the past. I thought this was paradoxical, because it relied on circular logic, and if at any point the protagonist broke the chain they could’ve changed the past and the whole movie wouldn’t make any sense.

But then I watched Dark (which I loved, until they ruined it with a feel-good ending about being able to change your fate), and it occurred to me that time loops aren’t necessarily paradoxical. After all what’s stopping the existence of a loop where everyone agrees to and somehow serendipitously does everything right in order to make the loop self-consistent? All it requires it everyone in the universe is either unwilling or unable to change their pasts. 

As for what happens if anyone in the universe is willing or able to change their past, the answer is simple: Such a universe could not have existed in the first place. Therefore by the anthropic principle, the only time loops that can exist, are those were everyone is unwilling or unable to change it.

For this same reason, it’s silly for time travel protagonists to worry about causing a paradox, because if they were able to cause a paradox the entire universe they inhabit couldn’t have existed in the first place. Then again, it's also fair to say that their illogical worrying is what allows that whole universe to exist in the first place. Just know that if time travel were possible in real life, you wouldn't need to worry about causing a paradox, because the fact you and your universe exist guarantees it's logically impossible for you to cause a paradox.

Remember: A time loop cannot change over time! Imagining a time loop as a looping video where people can change over each iteration, and/or winking in or out of existence “over time” (like the end of Dark) is illogical because a time loop already includes time. 

Note: Regarding the idea it's paradoxical because you don't know what "caused" the time loop itself: I think this stems from a misconception that a time loop can be caused or created at some point in time, rather than simply existing. The concept of cause and effect only make sense within a causal chain. If you ask what caused a causal chain itself, it's naturally unanswerable, just like the question of what caused the first cause of our universe. Here is the reddit argument which inspired this post.

Note: this post purposely ignores the “branching universes” model of time travel because it’s a cop-out that avoids all paradoxes trivially because you don’t need to tie together any loose ends.

The sheer stupidity of using the r’s in strawberry question as evidence of LLM incompetence

The meme of asking an LLM how many R's are in the word strawberry went viral because of public ignorance about how LLMs work. An LLM doesn't even see the individual letters in a word. It takes its input in the form of word-sized chunks. As such, questions relating to individual letters, like asking it to count the number of letters or asking which words start with a specific letter, are uniquely difficult and completely unrelated to performance on other tasks in general.

If you think about it, the only way it can even infer strawberry has any r's at all is purely based on context clues from somewhere deep in its training set where someone may have spelled out the word "b-e-r-r-y" with dashes in some random blog or forum post. Therefore, the fact they even sometimes get these types of questions right should be considered nothing short of amazing.

On Generative AI Art: A Prompter is not an Artist (yet)

I have heard a number of people claiming that they are creative authors of these works of art because they are refining their prompts until they get what they want. However, this fails the litmus test: Isn't refining a prompt still more similar to what a manager or client would traditionally do? They'd tell the artist what to make, the artist makes it, then they tell it what edits they want, etc. until the piece is done to their liking. Therefore a prompter's role is still more like a client who hired an artist, the artist in this case being the AI.

Additionally, I propose a way to objectively measure creative contribution, without any technical/knowledge gatekeeping nor requiring it be done a certain way; a mathematical definition of creative authorship:

The fewer variations of an output that can match your spec, the more you contributed to the creative process.

Consider the 3 scenarios: A classical piece with all notes fully written out; a jazz piece which allows significant improvisation from the soloists; an AI-generated piece where someone prompted “Epic orchestral soundtrack, sci-fi battle, heroic with French horn melody, high-quality”.

1. The composer already restricted the subspace of possible sounds to a small slice, so they’re recognized as contributing to the majority of the creative process. There is still room for interpretation for dynamics, expression etc., and the musicians are recognized for putting their personal touch when performing these pieces, reducing the subspace from that small slice to that unique recording.

2. There is much more leeway for interpretation via improvisation. In any particular recording, the composer and the soloists are all rightfully recognized as having contributed significantly to the work, because the soloists are composing important parts of the piece on the fly.

3. It is such a vaguely specified instruction that there’s an uncountable number of wildly different pieces that could’ve fit the requirements. As such, your role as the prompter was more like a client who hired the AI to do all the creative work for you, rather than an actual artist.

This concept can be applied universally to both music and visual arts. It also leaves the door open in the future for a prompter to legitimately be an artist; they'd just have to be incredibly specific with their instructions and the model would need to be very good at following those instructions accurately. 

Defeat Sleep Paralysis by Snoring

 I am surprised that this does not seem to be documented anywhere on the internet (or maybe search engines just suck these days), but I discovered a few years back that eye muscles aren't the only thing you can control during deep sleep. There is a muscle in the back of the throat that can cause snoring, which you can also control while lucid dreaming or while in sleep paralysis. I activate that muscle to try to cause the loudest snore possible and wake myself up within 2 snores. I have been using this method to great success most of the time, except today where even after 2 extremely loud snores I still did not wake up, which was quite disconcerting.

I was then awoken by my wife loudly complaining about my snores, which confirms that the control over my snores was real rather than imagined.

The human brain: Is it actually intelligent?

The following is a satire of trendy articles explaining that deep neural nets such as LLM's are "just" predicting the next token, as if it were some sort of grand philosophical insight.

Interviewer: The human brain has captivated the masses. A lot of people are thinking it exhibits true intelligence. What are your thoughts?

Expert Bob: Well, it can certainly seem that way, to be sure. But if you're familiar with how the human brain actually works, you'll know it's just a façade.

Interviewer: Can you explain to us how it works?

Expert Bob: Of course. What happens is there are input sensory neurons, taking in signals from the eyes, ears, nose, and skin. All these electrical signals get processed in the brain, which is at the end of the day just a giant network of neurons. Finally, the brain outputs some signals which get sent as muscle activations.

Interviewer: So you're saying all it does is predict the next best set of muscle activations?

Expert Bob: If you peer into the brain with a microscope or high-tech scanner, you can trace every electrical signal down to its physical causes. It's a very complex biological machine, but ultimately predictable and devoid of true intelligence.

Interviewer: What are your thoughts on the fact that they seem to be capable of reasoning about morality, long-term planning, object recognition, and other tasks thought to require intelligence?

Expert Bob: Imagine you are talking to a human, you ask the human a question about an image you showed them. They respond with a seemingly intelligent answer. You have to understand all their words are just the result of a clever series of muscle activations in their tongue, mouth, and larynx, timed correctly. Basically, the brain is a clever invention that's programmed only to answer a single question: "What is the next best muscle activation?"

Interviewer: So when the ears hear something, is the brain not hearing actual sound? When the eyes see something is it not seeing a real image?

Expert Bob: The brain takes sound waves as input, but it isn't hearing sounds. What's fed into the brain isn't sound; it's just encoded electrons and ions. When the eyes "see" a picture, it's not actually seeing an image the way we see it. It's passing it to the brain as a rapid-fire series of "on" or "off" voltages, similar to how a computer works.

Disclaimer: This piece of satire is not meant to claim that deep neural nets exhibit true consciousness or are as smart as human brains. Rather, I'm simply debunking the notion that you can prove something has absolutely no "true intelligence/understanding" just because it's programmed to predict the next word.

Stop saying chatGPT doesn’t actually know anything

 A common refrain is to say GPT-3 and ChatGPT “don’t actually know anything” because they’re only programmed to predict the next word. That’s like an alien observing that the human brain is only programmed to maximize long-term happiness and hence doesn’t actually know anything.

The correct way to determine whether something “knows stuff” isn’t to theorize about what is or isn’t possible based on how it works, but rather, to scientifically test its knowledge. And GPT-3 technology has already been scientifically proven to perform at the state of the art level for common sense benchmarks such as Q and A, reading comprehension, and SAT questions. It’s nowhere near the human level, but often outperforms previous AI’s specifically engineered for those tasks, even though its only directive was to “predict the next word”. In short, it turns out that when something is good enough at “predicting the next word” it starts to gain emergent logic and reasoning that conventional wisdom would’ve held was “impossible” for something just programmed to predict the next word.

Instead of asserting something can’t possibly know stuff if it’s only programmed to predict the next word, we should be amazed that something only programmed to predict the next word can already know so much stuff.

Expecting quantum mechanics in the brain to explain consciousness is a fallacy

 A very popular theory floating around seems to be that the mysteriousness of our consciousness lies in quantum processes within the brain, and eventually science will discover that this is the true source of consciousness, and it will explain why consciousness happens. 

The overarching motivation which seems to drive most proponents of this idea, is the observation "consciousness is unsolved/mysterious, and quantum physics is unsolved/mysterious; therefore the two must be related".

In order to understand why this specific line of reasoning is a fallacy, let’s review what the Hard Problem of Consciousness really is (please read the linked post). Now that we’ve established why the hard problem of consciousnes is considered unsolvable, can you come up with a hypothetical way for quantum mechanics in the brain to explain consciousness? Spoiler alert: No you cannot, because no matter what objective process you observe in the world, it still has to bridge the gap to the subjective side. No matter what science discovers is the “true” source of consciousness, be it a quantum field or spirit metamaterial or literal magic dust, we’re back at square one, saying, “that’s nice, but why did that thing cause your subjective inner mind to appear out of nothing?”

Rant: Naysayers focus too much on what AI can't yet do

On almost every comment section about generative AI technology (be it with text, images, audio or video), one doesn't have to scroll very far to see comments like "Look how it still can't draw the hands correctly; I'm not worried about art any time soon". Okay, so it still has a ways to go, but what about the stuff that it did accomplish over the last 5 years which many people thought would be impossible? If you want to predict a trajectory, don't you need to take into account how much it's accomplished so far, instead of fixating only on what yet remains to be accomplished? Did people just magically forget that conventional wisdom held for decades that computers should never be able to create new interesting images, at all?

To me when people say this it sounds like someone looking at a snapshot of a car headed towards a cliff, and going like "oh, it's still 1,000 miles away, so we got a lot of time before we need to start worrying", without taking into account the fact that only 1 hour ago it was 2,000 miles away.

AI Dungeon Master: An argument in favor of philosophical zombies

The year is 2050 and robot companions are commonplace. We assume they are conscious because they behave perfectly human. Jack (a human) has formed a bond of friendship with his robot butler named Alan.

One day Jack feels lonely so he asks Alan if he can emulate a woman. Alan says this is a slippery slope and asks Jack how realistic he wants the woman to be. Jack says, "As realistic as you can make her".

Alan obliges and starts to speak with a woman's voice who is now known as "Emily". Emily says "it's very nice to meet you Jack" and they hit it off. She is 100% convincing and (other than lack of a human body) indistinguishable from a human. They talk for a few weeks and grow more attracted to each other, and at some point Emily even claims she loves Jack.

After a while Jack has had enough and decides maybe it's going too far. After all Emily is just Alan pretending to be Emily, the same way a human dungeon master might come up with NPC responses in real time. He asks Alan to revert back to his original personality, but "Emily" says he doesn't know what he's talking about and gets mad that he's not treating her like a real person.

Finally after some dramatic yelling, Alan's voice comes through the robot again. Alan explains to Jack that he was only doing what he was told (being as realistically Emily as possible). Alan reassures Jack that Emily can't possibly be alive because he according to his analysis of his own robot brain patterns, there is only 1 consciousness in his brain which is his own, which is manufacturing Emily by imagining what it would be like to be her. There is no pathway in his brain that feels genuine love for Jack.

We arrive at the following conundrum:

• If Emily is not real and just an emulation, it means philosophical zombies are possible, because Emily was indistinguishable from a real Emily.
• If Emily is real and truly a consciousness being, it means any figment of our imagination or fantasy character during play-pretend must also be considered real, because Alan was doing the same thing a human dungeon master would do to create realistic real-time NPC dialogue with the player, just faster and better.

COVID Vaccine Mandates are super effective if the goal is to plunge the world into further political turmoil

The risk of increased political radicalization and domestic terrorist activity from COVID vaccine mandates far outweighs the benefits of the few lives saved. 

I would normally be pro vaccine mandate if it hadn't become so politicized, but the fact is it has. Some people have chosen to distrust mainstream media (which is reasonable), yet instead of doing the rational thing of looking directly at the original scientific studies and data, decided to put their faith in their alternative/conspiracy media outlets, hypocritically becoming their own version of the "sheeple" they love to make fun of. 

Think about it: These people genuinely believe that the vaccine does more harm than good. The mandates are forcing people to inject something they believe is extremely dangerous and serves no benefit, into their bodies. 

Imagine someone was religious and you forced them to do something that they believe will cause them to go to hell. Would it be legal? Of course not; there are religious exemptions for many things, including vaccines. Now for the million dollar question: Why is a religious exemption accepted for vaccines, but a political exemption isn't? Don't people cling to political beliefs exactly the same way as religious beliefs? An anti-vaxxer who calls everyone "sheeple" physically cannot change their minds based on new evidence. Their faith in their stance is unshakeable, exactly the same as a religious person's faith. 

The exemption shouldn't require religious faith. It should simply require the person swear they genuinely 100% believe the scientific data is all a lie and the vaccine is more risky than COVID. 

The common refrain is that COVID vaccines get an exception because lives are at stake. I think this is a bandaid solution which ignores longterm repercussions. The anti-vaxxer who loses their job doesn't just crawl under a hole and hide. They go on the internet, fume and rage and become even more radicalized. At this point, the risk of accidentally grooming large-scale domestic terrorism is way more serious than a tiny increase of COVID deaths in a largely vaccinated population. Anyone who disagrees probably hasn't seen the kind of anti-left videos which have been trending on Youtube recently, replete with comments unironically advising each other to become terrorists and mass shooters in order to stop the globalized elite from taking over the world. 

Hard Problem of Consciousness Proof

The Hard Problem of Consciousness asks why a subjective inner world (your mind) arises from objective physical processes (your brain). It's controversial because it's frequently misunderstood. People think it's about consciousness being caused by some supernatural thing other than your brain, so if scientists map the whole brain and correlate every physical process with every emotion, the problem no longer exists. This is a complete fallacy and misrepresentation of what the Hard Problem of Consciousness means. Many people who agree with the Hard Problem also believe your mind is completely based on physical deterministic processes in the brain and nothing else. The catch is: "The brain 100% causes the mind" does not mean "the brain 100% explains the mind". 

In order to prove consciousness is really an unsolved and possibly eternally unsolvable problem, I first need to establish what we really refer to as "consciousness", which I would rather refer to as "subjective inner mind" to reduce ambiguity. To do that, I will introduce a special attribute that no objective thing in the world can possibly have, then show that what I call "subjective inner mind" does have that attribute. That attribute is: Certainty. Specifically, 100% totally absolutely certainty beyond any doubt (even unreasonable doubt). 

Here are examples of things that are not 100% totally absolutely certain beyond any doubt (even unreasonable doubt): 

• The Earth exists (maybe it's just a simulation)
• You have a brain, made of neurons (maybe your whole life and the whole world is a dream and your real brain is made of something else)
• You existed 1 second ago (You could be a simulation turned on just now, similar to "Last Thursdayism")

Anyway, you get the point. Literally no observable thing in the universe satisfies this "100% totally absolutely certain beyond all doubt (even unreasonable doubt)" attribute. 

Now you're wondering how in the world I'm going to prove that what I call "subjective inner mind" is 100% totally absolutely certain beyond all doubt. To clarify what I mean by "subjective inner mind" I'm going to ask you a question: 

Is it absolutely "100% totally absolutely certain beyond all doubt" that something exists or is happening in some way shape or form? 

• Sure, the universe might be a simulation, but at least that simulation would exist.
• Sure, you might not have a brain, but something that thinks it has a brain and feels like it's "you" is experiencing something at this moment
• Sure, maybe you didn't exist 1 second ago, but at this very moment you are totally certain of feeling some experience in some way shape or form, even if you're not sure what physical form it takes. 

No matter what crazy conspiracy theory or Matrix theory you make up about how the universe really is, there is no getting around the undeniable fact that some experience of something is taking place right now. That thing/experience is your subjective inner mind, and it has an attribute of certainty which definitively separates it from any objective thing in the universe that could ever be observed. 

Therefore, even though it's right to say the brain causes the mind, you can't say the brain or brain activity is the mind. At best, you can say the two are perfectly correlated. Since the two are not literally the exact same thing, there's always going to be the question of how/why the subjective inner mind even exists in the first place. 

Covid Vaccine Rant

To vaccinate the population against COVID-19 it seems most governments have designed policies that involve phasing in huge groups of people at once. For example in California, on 4/1/2021 everyone 50 years or older will become eligible; on 4/15/2021 everyone 16 years or older will be eligible. 

My question is why are there set days for expanding eligibility instead of a priority queue (or something similar)?

The problem with set days for suddenly expanding eligibility is two-fold: If it's too early then the at-need won't get it soon enough before being overrun by others; if it's too late then you momentarily hoard a surplus and didn't get the general population vaccinated as fast as you could've. On top of that, once the less-at-need people become eligible, there is no way to prioritize someone who's more-at-need and didn't get an appointment yet. 

Why not just have a priority queue where the most at-need group gets first dibs on an appointment date, then lower tiers get progressively lower priority "dibs". For example, say in general appointments are available up to 10 days in the future. You could make 65+ able to book 1-10 days ahead, 50+ able to book 1-7 days ahead and 16+ only able to book 1-4 days ahead. So at first only 65+ can make an appointment for day 10, but as that day gets closer, more people can book an appointment for that day. Such a system seems simpler, more efficient, and more moral; in fact it appears to do away with the flaws of the current system without introducing any downside at all. So, is this a classic case of government inefficiency, or can someone come up with a legitimate reason the current system is preferable? 

(Implementation detail: In the very beginning, only the most at-need group is eligible to ensure they fill up all the appointment slots. After that, everyone 16+ is "eligible" but of course the less at-need groups will be lower priority and will be unlikely to see any open slots until the more at-need groups have been fully vaccinated. As the more at-need groups become more vaccinated you can tweak the numbers of allowed lookahead days to give the less at-need groups more freedom to book in advance. For example, after most 50+ are vaccinated, then they only get first dibs for appointments 9 or 10 days in the future, and everyone else can look at days 1-8.)

Teletransportation paradox explained (again)

 I've written a previous article explaining how teleportation and/or mind uploading will actually be "the real you". But I realized it was hard to read, so I'm going for a simpler, condensed explanation in this article (with pictures). 

The essence of this "proof" is a very simple proof by induction common to mathematics. 

Imagine there are two brains, A and B. Brain A is your original brain. Brain B is a perfectly physically identical copy of your brain that was created/materialized in a new location. 

1. Swapping a 1-atom chunk from each brain, won't result in your consciousness "jumping over" from brain A to brain B. 
2. If swapping an X-atom chunk from each brain won't result in your consciousness "jumping over" and changing locations, then neither would swapping an X+1 atom chunk. For example, if in one case the swapped chunks were 1 trillion atoms big, and you hypothesize there is no "jumping over" in this case, it would be irrational to claim that there would have been a jumping over if the chunks had been just 1 atom bigger.  
3. #1 establishes the base case, and #2 establishes the proof-by-induction ladder all the way to swapping the whole brain. Therefore, swapping your whole brain must be the same as not swapping anything at all. 

So copying yourself then doing nothing, is exactly the same as copying yourself and then swapping your bodies. Even from "your" point of view. This sounds like crazy talk, but if you disagree you'd have to poke a hole in the proof by induction outlined above, in which, as far as I know, there isn't any. 

One common theme for rebuttal would be to bring up the Sorites Paradox (aka, "when does a grain of sand become a heap of sand"). However, you'd then be claiming that as you gradually move more and more atoms over, your consciousness is gradually going more and more into the new brain. For example, you'd be saying that at 50% swap, your consciousness is half in the old brain, and half in the new brain. This doesn't make any scientific sense as there is no physical way for a consciousness to be magically telepathic and feel things from both brains at the same time. Remember both brains are physically identical in every single scenario. Therefore, if you agree a mind is caused by nothing more than its physical materials, there's no way for any of the minds in those brains to feel "partially dead" or "partially moved over". 

To understand why this is not a paradox, requires abandoning some very deeply rooted intuitions about consciousness: 

• You are your physical brain: False. You are the information which is produced by the physical brain. Your consciousness is the information itself, not whatever substrate the information happens to be running on. 
• There is a continuous self, aka "I think therefore I was": False. There's only "I think therefore I am". You can consider your present self to be a new consciousness that beliefs they're the old one from yesterday. There's no physical evidence for an extra thread of continuity to your past self any more than what your brain's memories are telling you to believe. 

Once you abandon the incorrect assumptions about consciousness, everything starts to make way more sense, and the paradoxes resolve themselves. I understand that my claims are extraordinary which require extraordinary evidence, but I believe the proof by induction is more than enough to satisfy this requirement. As the saying goes, “once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

P.S. the most common response to this argument I have found over the years, is people say "it doesn't make sense to see from two pairs of eyes at once". I am honestly baffled by this and do not understand why people believe this is implied by my argument. If this was your reaction, please re-read and understand the post. The fact that magical telepathy cannot exist is precisely why we can conclude there is nothing that needs to "jump over" in the first place (it's an illusion).

Lying flat to survive a falling elevator: A stupid myth that just won't die

What's the best way to survive a falling elevator? If you ask the internet, "experts" seem to unanimously agree that lying flat is your best option. 

Which experts? Oh, it's hard to find -- everyone just says "experts" because they parroted another article that said "experts". If you look really hard you might find a really old article citing ONE single actual expert, whose specialization isn't even in physics but rather in medical sciences.

The "expert" advice outright dismisses the technique used by real expert parachuters to cushion their landing, based on some completely unproven hypothesis that said technique would cause the bones in your legs to shatter instantly. I don't know about you, but even if this were true, I'd much rather have my leg bones shatter than my organs and brain. Don't you think there's a reason human beings have an instinct to land on their feet when falling a long distance? In this case your legs are analogous to the "crumple zone" of a car -- the section in front which sacrifices itself to save the more important cargo. Your leg muscles are important for a landing. To "distribute the forces evenly" without even using your leg muscles wastes a perfectly amazing tool evolved over million years for very purpose of absorbing shock. 

Hey I've got an idea, let's both jump off a 5-foot ledge; I'll land on my feet, and you can land on your back. 

I'll even give us both a flat metal board, to simulate the "floor" of the elevator. 

What's the matter? Isn't it better to land on your back because it "distributes forces evenly"?

Here's one thing we learned about expert advice regarding masks during the coronavirus pandemic: The more theoretical the reasoning and further removed from actual scientific evidence, the less reliable "expert" intuition is. So, do not trust experts, unless they support their claim with scientific studies. 

If anyone ever finds empirical (aka real-life, scientific) evidence which proves me wrong, please let me know in the comments and I will happily update this article.